Black Tears

From what I can gather, the 'emo' subculture began with its roots in punk rock in the mid to late '90s. For a few years it was nothing more than a musical subgenre, but eventually a subcultural character developed from the music and young adolescents began to adopt the mannerisms, clothing styles and attitudes to life embodied by their favourite emo bands.

'Emo' is an abbreviation of 'emotional'. The music is indeed a substratum of punk rock, but it is characterised by a distincitve emotional flair of a certain type. This 'certain type' interests me and I want to talk about it (when I get to it further down this entry). The music tends to be very pessimistic. In keeping with this pessimism, emo band members wear black, often use black make-up and often die their hair black. The pessimism is very much self-absorbed and inner-oriented.

This inner-orientation is one element that distinguishes them from other musically born subcultures. Emo is quite different to 'punk' or 'goth', even though surface imagery like choices of clothing and closely related musical tastes, and a generally pessimistic attitude towards life, seem to closely correspond. Most of us have a basic idea of what 'goth' or 'punk' are. Goth and punk are similar to each other in their inherently countercultural values; they both oppose the norms and values developed by late capitalist society. They oppose consumerism and their own conceptions of what 'conformity' is; they tend to be repelled by the image of the white-bread, urban middle-class nuclear family. Emo does not oppose these ideals because it is tied so closely to them.

How is it that a subculture that is, on the surface, so similar to punk and particularly goth, have such different values? This is one intriguing facet of emo. Emos do not oppose consumerism because they were brought up in the same white middle class families that vote republican and live on a 1/4-acre block. They're stuck in the middle of mainstream and alternative values. A conservative, subjectified education system has brought up teenagers with an uncritical sensibility. A desire to be more independent, like their more articulate goth counterparts, has led them to the same kind of dark outlook on life in a weak attempt at pseudo-social-resistance, but, because of their uncritical sensibilities, they offer no social critique; they can only turn the pessimism inwards. Emo negativity is subsequently highly individualistic. Many such songs are bleating whines about how hard the singer's life is.

The worst case in point that I know of is a band called Simple Plan. I make no attempt to hide tendentiousness here; I hate these guys with a passion. I've heard four of their singles on the radio and on TV. Three of them are pathetic whining about how hard the singer's life is and how everyone mistreats and abuses him. The lyrics of the other one is an assortment of cliches that form a sort of water-weak moan about how terrible it is to live in our society. You might state here that this does suggests an attempt at social criticism, but prevalence of these silly cliches show that the singer is more interested in complaining about how bad things are than actually trying to explore why and how they're bad. Look at the lyrics here, and I'll break them down a bit.

Simple Plan - Crazy. There initially seems to be some interesting points made in the song. Girls that take diet pills; needless desires to be famous; breakdown of the nuclear family. These are real problems, right? The problem is, the singer unconsciously frames social problems within his own self-absorbed misery. He asks in the chorus, is anybody gonna save me? Can anybody tell me what's going on?
Huh? Is anyone gonna save you? I thought you were saying how bad society was, not your life.
So where does he go after the first chorus? He looks at the family. Now, I could be wrong here, but given the lyrics to another of their singles, in which he blames his father for being a perfectionist whose standards he can't possibly meet, his choice to complain in the previously discussed single about parental mismanagement where 'parents act like enemies' sounds a lot like a disguised plead for sympathy.
There's also a little bridge in there that sums up the emo character in a way that I couldn't describe any better: No one cares/No one likes to share/I guess life's unfair.
What attempt at social criticsm there is thus provides a shameful disguise for the emo singer's need to tell the world, which it seems that he sees as a giant metaphorical therapist, how miserable his life is.

The reason that the word 'emo' has such a bad name among listeners of metal and older rock is that the emo's character shames the face of rock. Rock was until recently countercultural and socially evocative. Now, it's becoming self-obsessed and weak. Emo is the ultimate expression of this.

Next I want to look at bad faith and falsity of character in the retail industry.